Page 71 - The Errors the American National Academy of Sciences
P. 71
2) The really impor-
tant point is that the
"speciation" in ques-
tion is not an increase
in genetic informa-
tion, but on the con-
trary stems from a loss
of such information. The reason for the
differentiation is not that new genetic in-
formation has been added to one or
other of the variants. There is no
such addition. For instance,
neither of the variants acquires a new protein, enzyme, or organ. There
is no "development" here. On the contrary, instead of a population
which had previously harbored different sets of genetic information (in
our example, a population possessing both long and short hair, as well
as both light and dark colors), now there are two populations that are
both impoverished from the point of view of genetic information.
For this reason, nothing about speciation supports the theory of
evolution. The theory of evolution claims that living species evolved
from one another, from the simpler to the more complex, completely
by chance. For the theory to be taken seriously, therefore, it needs to
posit a mechanism for increasing genetic information. It needs to
be able to explain how living things without eyes, ears, hearts,
lungs, wings, feet, and other organs and systems came to ac-
quire them, and where the genetic information describ-
ing such systems and organs came from. A
mechanism that divides an already-existing
species into two groups, each of which un-
dergoes a loss of genetic information,
clearly has nothing to do with this.
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